Education Ministry Director General Shimshon Shoshani told the Knesset Education Committee on Wednesday that the principal of one school that has refused to absorb any Ethiopian children - the Chabad-run school Or Chaya - would be summoned to a hearing.

The other schools in Petah Tikva, especially the religious ones, will have to admit the Ner Etzion students.

...Contributing to the desire to avoid absorbing these students is the growing competition between the state-religious and the private schools; the latter receive generous state support but have fewer Ethiopian-immigrant students.

The private schools admit only the better students, figures in the state-religious education system say.

MK Nitzan Horowitz (Meretz) said yesterday that he would reintroduce the bill prohibiting discrimination against school children, which would deny funding from schools that discriminated.

Horowitz said that the failure of the bill was directly responsible for the refusal of the private Orthodox Petah Tikva schools to accept children of Ethiopian origin, although these schools receive most of their funding from the state.

Q: Two Ethiopian children joined each of my children’s classes this year. Were they from Nir Etzion?

A: Yes, each class in our school took on two additional Ethiopian children. The private religious schools didn’t object as they did two years ago.

They were warned in advance that they would face sanctions if they did not accept the children. Mind you, this is not a great hardship for the schools as the Ethiopian children come with generous funding for the many ancillary services they receive. Some of the children from Nir Etzion will attend schools outside of Petach Tikva.

A recent Bank of Israel report discloses that the number of Haredi students, male and female, rose from 2,000 in 2005 to 6,000 in 2010. Most of the increase was among men, who comprise 42% of ultra-Orthodox students.

That is a drop in the sea compared with the number of Haredim who do not seek training and elect to continue Torah studies their entire lives: 60,000 obtained army deferments because of religious studies. But there is the scent of change in the air.

...There is good reason most of the drive, however, comes from foreign donors. There, unlike in Israel, most young Haredi men don't continue to study Torah. They gain an education and go to work.

"These donors went to university and set up global businesses," Gonen says.

"They think that the Israeli model of studying Torah is overdone. Sure, some students will turn into the intellectual infrastructure of the Haredi world; but all of them? That's unlikely," he concludes.

A bookstore in the capital’s ultra-Orthodox Mea She’arim neighborhood is struggling against a wave of attacks by a haredi group called Sikrikim (“Sicarii”) that other business-owners have called the “mafia of Mea Sha’arim.”

Since the bookstore, known as Or Hachaim/Manny’s, opened in March 2010, men have smashed its windows several times, glued its locks shut, thrown tar and fish oil, and dumped bags of human excrement inside.

Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger was harassed and had stones thrown at him while leaving the store last year.

The National Council of Young Israel and the International Young Israel Movement’s Israel region dedicated on Thursday a restored scroll at the Sirkin army base near Petach Tikvah, immediately north of Tel Aviv.

The Torah scroll is the 200th scroll to be donated to the IDF and the first one in the Young Israel donation program that was saved from the Holocaust.

That being the case, when it comes to Christians who believe that God chose Israel, and that all of the good prophecies should be realized within Israel, and they are not working to convert us, God forbid, rather, to strengthen us – then all the severe things mentioned about Christians do not apply to them.

On the contrary – great tikun is being made by them, they are righteous Gentiles, and God will reward them.

...There is still room to ask: Maybe there are some missionaries amongst our friends who want to convert us? Indeed, if such a thing is proven – they must be fought.

However, as far as anyone who has not been proven to be a missionary is concerned, we must return to the basic, appropriate conduct – respect and love.

In an apparent infringement on personal privacy legislation and in defiance of laws preventing incitement, an anonymous group has taken to distributing flyers “naming and shaming” Messianic Jews (Christians) living in the Jerusalem-area town of Mevaseret Zion.

The personal details of some 10 people, including photographs and home addresses, are displayed on the flyer, which was delivered to hundreds of households in the town of 30,000 residents.

Christians for Israel International, headquartered in Nijkerk, the Netherlands, and the Brussels-based European Coalition for Israel, will hold joint protests on September 13 in The Hague and September 19 in Brussels, with the stated aim being “to defend Jerusalem as the undivided capital of the Jewish state of Israel.”

The groups have also published and distributed a series of articles in Dutch, German and English highlighting the legal, historical and biblical rights of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, which they have made available on a website aimed at Christians called www.whyisrael.org

The third annual conference on interreligious tolerance will take place at the Ethics Center of the Konrad Adenauer Conference Center at Mishkenot Sha’ananim on Wednesday.

As in the previous two years, there will be high-profile representatives of several local religious communities on various discussion panels and at speakers’ podiums.

These include Sheikh Abdul Rahman Kabha, the Interior Ministry’s inspector general of the Islamic Holy Places in Israel; Dr. Albert Lincoln, the Haifa-based secretary general of the Baha’i International Community; and Rabbi Yuval Cherlow, who runs the hesder yeshiva in Petah Tikva and has a long history of exploring common ground between religious and secular Jews.

The fact that you and I keep the Shabbat, eat kosher and take pleasure in the Torah is no longer sufficient in order to live in the same ideological home. Perhaps we better use different names on the door too. We’ll be called “Religious Zionism” and you’ll be called “Fanatics.”

Our women shall cover their heads, while your women shall put on a burqa. We shall adopt the moderation of Beit Hillel, while you adopt Beit Shamai. We’ll take Rabbi Yehuda Halevi while you take Rabbi Dov Lior. Let’s separate.

Members of the Eretz Shalom movement visited on Tuesday the mosque that was torched Monday morning in Qusra, a village south of Shechem in the Palestinian-Authority controlled areas of Judea and Samaria.

An unlikely meet in the West Bank: Settler rabbi and peace activist Menachem Froman on Tuesday called for the arsonists of the mosque in Qusara to be expelled from Israel.

Rabbi Froman, a resident of the Tekoa settlement, along with his colleagues from the Eretz Shalom movement, visited the Arab village in an attempt to quell tensions following Monday’s alleged "price tag" vandalism act.

The six-person non-profit organization recently held the first interfaith meeting to formulate climate change policy, which impressively resulted in commitments of support from Israel's Chief Rabbinate, the Palestinian Ministry of Religious Affairs (Waqf), the Palestinian Sharia Courts and the assembly of the Heads of Churches of Jerusalem.

The story of Fadi Bahir and Hezy Roth can definitely be adapted into a feature film: Imagine an ultra-Orthodox man dressed in black, entering an Arab neighborhood in east Jerusalem in order to save someone's life.

Hours later, an Arab man runs into the heart of the haredi neighborhood of Mea Shearim in order to provide medical care.

The center-stage appearance of the wife of an ultra-Orthodox leader, and all the more so in a newspaper interview, over a sensitive family dispute, would be impossible in routine times, but the situation in Rabbi Yoshiyahu Pinto's court is in no way routine.

The rabbi's wife denies all the accusations of money laundering and says that she and her husband are the only victims here.

A few evenings every month, some of Israel's wealthiest and most powerful people can be found in a living room in the seaside city of Ashdod, waiting to have a few minutes with a rabbi they see as an advisor, guru or miracle worker.

...Unlike most ultra-Orthodox rabbis, Pinto does not press his secular adherents to observe Jewish law and rejects the mixing of religion and government, [psychologist and sociologist Yoram Bilu of Hebrew University in Jerusalem.] said.

The Jewish Authority makes it very clear that even if the Israeli government decides to give up parts of Judea and Samaria to the Arabs, its members do not intend to be expelled from their homes as was the case in Gush Katif in 2005.